In these piping days when fiction plays the handmaid or prophet to
various propaganda; when the majority of writers are trying to prove
something, or acting as venders of some new fangled social nostrums;
when the insistent drums of the Great God Réclame are bruising human
tympani, the figure of Joseph Conrad stands solitary among English
novelists as the very ideal of a pure and disinterested artist. Amid
the clamour of the market place a book of his is a sea shell which
pressed to the ear echoes the far away murmur of the sea; always the
sea, either as rigid as a mirror under hard, blue skies or shuddering
symphonically up some exotic beach. Conrad is a painter doubled by a
psychologist; he is the psychologist of the sea and that is his chief
claim to originality, his Peak of Darien. He knows and records its
every pulse beat. His genius has the rich, salty tang of an
Elizabethan adventurer and the spaciousness of those times. Imagine a
Polish sailor who read Flaubert and the English Bible, who bared his
head under equatorial few large stars and related his doings in
rhythmic, sonorous, coloured prose; imagine a man from a landlocked
country who "midway in his mortal life" began writing for the first
time and in an alien tongue, and, added to an almost abnormal power of
description, possessed the art of laying bare the human soul, not
after the meticulous manner of the modern Paul Prys of psychology, but
following the larger method of Flaubert, who believed that actions
should translate character imagine these paradoxes and you have
partly imagined Joseph Conrad, who has so finely said that
"imagination, and not invention, is the supreme master of art as of
life... Continue reading book >>